For many years, I worked as a Program Coordinator and Family Caregiving Consultant at the Alzheimer's Association and Del Mar Caregiver Resource Center. During that time I wrote a monthly newsletter for families taking care of loved ones with progressive incurable memory loss and dementia. Those articles are now a book, and this blog was created to share it (and any new articles I write) with all of you.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Going through a Great Recession crisis in addition to family caregiving has got to be so intense... I don't want to think about it! But the one thing that makes it better is banding together in family and community. I'm announcing my latest book today. It's not about family caregiving or Alzheimer's Disease or dementia at all! But it IS about the great importance of going beyond differences to band together to heal our deepest, most critical concerns.

The book is called WAKING UP IN THE GREAT RECESSION MORMON DESERT and people who reviewed an advance copy of it have given it some wonderful reviews. For example, David Spangler who was the previous director of Findhorn and has sometimes been called the father of the New Age movement had this to say:

This book is a winner. It has everything a good book should have: suspense, excitement, pathos, joy, laughter—-lots of laughter—and great characters you care about and can genuinely root for! And it's non-fiction! But what it has most is love and wisdom. Profound, heart-opening love and wisdom. It is hands down one of the best books on spirituality and its role in meeting the challenges of our time that I have read. And did I say that it's funny, too? Be good to yourself and read this book. Be good to your friends and buy them a copy. ~ David Spangler, author of FACING THE FUTURE and SUBTLE WORLDS: AN EXPLORER'S FIELD NOTES.

My partner Paul and I are the "great characters", by the way. The book is a memoir and it follows our path from our original home in the beautiful New Age, ultra-progressive town of Santa Cruz, CA to a predominantly ultra-conservative Republican Mormon community in the eastern Arizona high desert. The timing is immediately after the election of Barack Obama and the passage of Proposition 8 (the law repealing gay marriage in California). The result is at turns poignant and funny and eventually leads to a spiritual wake-up call that shows the importance of connecting the political and the personal in our task of developing spiritually on the planet.